The idea isn’t the
hard bit – even though it’s a cool one. But if you told 100 writers they had to
write a book around an expert in art restoration, jumping chronology with different
forensic clues linking the satisfying present story to discrete episodes from
an increasingly distant past, you’d get some interesting responses, but I think
Brooks’ spin would be among the front runners. The writing is professional, the
pacing and structure well executed.

In line with her pun
title, a Semitic theme runs alongside the literary one – and the stories are
generally dark, picking up on centuries of persecution. I wonder if that lens
is perhaps distorted these days – we can only see Jewish history through
post-holocaust eyes, and in reality the chances are that dipping into random
lives would produce as many pedestrian and even fortunate portraits as tragic
ones. Or maybe that’s completely wrong: it took something as shocking as the holocaust
to open people’s eyes to what’s been pervasive for centuries. Dunno.

I like that Brooks
works hard to show intelligence, respectability, nuance, character in her
historical portraits – dumb, but recently I’ve bumped a bit into, ‘Weren’t they
all stupid back then’ nonsense. That being said, there’s the danger that in
making modern audiences non-dismissive, she may have made some characters too
modern. I’ve seen this in, say, Pat Barker and Ben Elton,
where alternate voices – which definitely existed at the time – are seen as
mainstream. I’m a cracked record with this, but one of the ways that Patrick O’Brian
excels in the historical fiction genre is that his likable, respectable heroes have
values consistent with their context that would be offensive to many modern
readers, including O’Brian. But they are still likable and respectable. Brooks’
heroes, however, tend to have surprisingly modern values about things like
race, sexuality and patriarchy.

She effectively and deliberately
foregrounds powerful women, but it reflects more poorly on society than her
that to similarly foreground powerful men would go largely unnoticed. I didn’t
really chime with the main character – I found her too cold and humourless –
and towards the end embarrassingly PC, particularly in the Australian context
talking like a flamin’ 19th century outback
Aussie caricature (yabloomin’
drongo), which made no sense given her urban contemporary background. And
definitely, as with so many book-club texts like this one, the book fits neatly
into the ‘well written novels that weren’t written for me’ box.